A Decade of Plays

The departing arts editor and theater critic on productions that left lasting impressions

Matt Loney as Macbeth in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, as performed by Arizona Theatre Company in
2005.

Two weeks from now, if all goes according to plan, the Tucson
Weekly will publish my final review as the paper's theater critic
and arts editor.

Let me make this clear: I haven't been fired, and I'm not quitting
in disgust. It's just that I've been contributing to the Weekly
for 10 years, during much of which I've reviewed one to three plays in
almost every issue, and after all this time, I want my weekends
back.

So there are no hard feelings, and I'll still fill in for editor
Jimmy Boegle when he goes on vacation this fall, and I may contribute
an occasional piece in the future. But after this month, someone else
will be pontificating in this space every week.

I have a couple of time-sensitive articles to write for the next two
issues, so right now, during this week's theater lull, I'll bid you a
premature farewell with a few thoughts on what most impressed me on
Tucson's stages during this decade.

Oddly enough, the moments I remember most distinctly were the
silences. In 2001, for example, during Arizona Theatre Company's
production of Wit, directed by Samantha K. Wyer, the main
character, dying of cancer, suspended her brainy logorrheic monologue
to sink into her hospital bed while a nurse slowly, tenderly washed her
hands. Those few seconds said almost as much about human connection as
the rest of the script.

Then in ATC's 2005 production of Macbeth, directed by Stephen
Wrentmore, there was that long, harrowing silence when Macduff was
informed of his family's murder. It expressed the character's shock and
pain more effectively than any amount of wailing. (A different director
used the same effect in the recent Broadway production of
Macbeth featuring Patrick Stewart.)

In 2003, Arizona Repertory Theatre's production of
Metamorphoses, directed by Harold Dixon, was regularly
punctuated with arresting silences. Here's a catalog of them from my
review: "There's the speechless horror of Midas (Nat Cassidy), the
cigar-chomping, platitude-spouting mogul with the golden touch, who has
inadvertently turned his precious daughter into precious metal; the
graceful way Alcyone (Molly Jasper), running in slow motion to her
drowned husband, arcs one arm and then the other behind her, drawing
her wrists to the small of her back to signify the wings of the seabird
she has become; Cinyras (Matt Bailey) furiously attempting to drown his
daughter, Myrrha (Lisa Sproul), upon learning that she is the woman who
has blindfolded and seduced him; and the devastating image, repeated
again and again, of Orpheus (Cassidy) turning to look at his beloved
Eurydice (Lezlee Benninger), and the god Hermes (Noah Todd) regretfully
pulling her back to Hades as the lovers reach out to each other."

This is the poetry of stillness and mute movement.

Probably the performer who made the greatest impression on me in
production after production while hardly saying a word was onetime
student Shawna Cormier, whom I once described as "the best listener and
reactor the UA has had onstage in a long time." Sometimes fragile,
sometimes impish, Cormier brought tremendous character to such plays as
Henry IV and Midwives.

Of course, moments involving sound have also stuck with me,
including some musical numbers. And I say this as someone who is
usually dissatisfied with musicals: The classics tend to be
dramatically naïve; the new ones tend to have forgettable music;
and all of them tend to be produced by people who are better at
conveying spectacle than character.

OK, those generalizations are unfair, and if you browse my archives,
you'll see that I have actually praised several local musical
productions. But what comes to mind right now is hardly standard
Broadway fare.

Somehow, I've never shaken the memory of David Morden changing out
of a blond wig, stiletto heels and silver evening gown into a French
workman's overalls as he sang Kurt Weill's mawkish yet heartbreaking
cabaret song "Je ne t'aime pas." What could have been surreal or simply
bizarre actually came across with great emotional sincerity. (This was
part of a musical sequence that preceded the Rogue Theatre's production
of Jean Genet's The Maids; you should always arrive early
for Rogue's pre-performance musical sequences, masterminded by Harlan
Hokin.)

And I still get a little choked up when I think about William Finn's
Elegies—Looking Up, essentially a staged song cycle
presented by Arizona Onstage Productions in 2006. As I explained in my
review, "Each song is a tender remembrance of people lost to us, and
yet each song is a celebration of the joy and love those people gave
us. ... The singers tend to hold a mark on stage, but they are living
each song and its backstory within them as they perform, and the effect
is always very real and sometimes unbearably touching. (Director Kevin)
Johnson has done a tremendous job of drawing this out of his uniformly
talented cast."

Elegies and everything else I've described came as surprises,
transcending my expectations in very subtle ways. The possibility,
though not the certainty, of such moments exists with almost every
show. That possibility has drawn me back to the theater week after week
all these years—and it should draw you back in the years to
come.